Your private tape library – a pre-configured virtual machine with MHVTL and iSCSI export capability
I am using MHVTL for quite a while now. MHVTL emulates a configurable tape library and stores the data in the file system. Normally when testing i am installing the backup software directly where MHVTL runs. But that only works for simple configurations.
For complex configurations for instance with drive sharing this approach does not work. A few days ago i sumbled accross the idea to export the tape library and the drives via iSCSI. So i made a VM based on Oracle Enterprise Linux 6 Update 2 plus the most recent MHVTL version plus self-compiled tgt to test this. And in fact: It does work without any major problems.
With this blog post i would like to share my VM with all interested people. You can download the VM here (728 MB). The root password is ‘root’.